María Rosa Lida de Malkiel

Born María Rosa Lida to a family of Jewish immigrants in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she had two older brothers: Emilio, who became a hematologist, and Raimundo, who became a philologist.

Lida graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Buenos Aires in 1932, winning a prize as best student.

In 1947 she went to the United States on a post-graduate Rockefeller grant, and studied with Dr. Amado Alonso at Harvard University, where she also began teaching.

[2] In 1948, Lida married the Russian-born Yakov Malkiel, a scholar of Romance language etymology and philology at the University of California, Berkeley.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Lida taught courses in Latin and Greek at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Buenos Aires.

Lida de Malkiel had worked for 15 years on her book about La Celestina; it was published three months after her death.